


(it looks like) you might be one of us

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2016 [12]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Assassins, Backstory, Blood, Choldhood Trauma, Dark, Gore, M/M, Murder, Not Beta Read, On Men and Monsters, Prompt Fic, Sequel, Twisted Realtionship, Violence, Wishlist_Fic, and all the warnings that come with that, assassin!Stiles, murder boyfriends, or something like it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:22:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8867389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which Stiles is his mother's son with her razor in his pocket and other people's blood on his hands. 
(Wishlist, Day 12, sequel to this)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Cywscross, who asked for more Assassin!Stiles, with Peter cheering him on. I hop you like.

+

When Stiles is six, his mother puts a straight razor in his hands. In heavily accented English she tells him, “Careful, love, it is sharp.”

When he is thirteen, a woman he once called ‘aunt’ hands him a gun and says, “Claudia would skin me alive.” 

When he is seventeen (eighteen, nineteen, he can’t remember his real birthday anymore) Peter passes him a file full of names, faces and places and asks, “Will you let me watch, sweetheart?”

Stiles, flicking an old razor open and closed in the pocket of his jeans, cocks his head to one side and says nothing at all.

+

When he gets home from burning another set of blood-stained, bleach-dotted clothes in the woods, Peter is lounging on his bed like it hasn’t taken him three weeks to even set foot inside the property. The last time he tried, the wolfsbane bomb he triggered left him scar-pocked for a week. 

The werewolf sniffs as soon as Stiles enters, a shudder running through him at the scent of smoke and ashes and under it, maybe, a hint of blood left. 

Stiles gives the older man a raised eyebrow. “Did you want a treat now, dude? Cause I’m really not that impressed.”

Peter sits up. “Have you looked at the files I gave you, Stiles?”

With a snort, Stiles shakes his head and gives the bathroom door a mournful look. He needs a shower, but he’s not leaving Peter alone in his room. There is nothing incriminating here, of course, nothing but the single gun and the razor he always keeps on him, but, but, but. 

He is his mother’s son.

“No.”

He has, of course, but he’s curious to see how much it matters to Peter. It’s not like the wolf can tell the lie. 

“Why not?”

“Because I’m busy and I don’t really care?” He quirks a smile. “Why do you want me to?”

“Why, everyone wants to know their gifts are appreciated, don’t you think?”

“A gift that profits you as well. If I get rid of them for you, you’re safe, your family’s land is safe and hey, maybe you bag yourself a mortally wounded alpha down the road, right?” His smile is too sharp, too little teenage boy, too much seasoned killer, but if anyone can take it, if anyone can look at him and not recoil, it’s the man with the red, red claws and the blue, blue eyes. 

Peter bobs is head in something that looks almost like a bow. “And you get to keep your puppy safe and have some fun.”

“You think I do what I do for fun?” Stiles demands, voice flat.

Peter leans forward, hands on his thighs, and asks, equally flat, “Don’t you?”

+

He wonders, sometimes, if his mother always knew what his father was. 

If she looked at him, the first time they met, and knew that he was a monster. A monster dressed in human skin, parading through a nightclub in Saint Petersburg when it was still Leningrad and she was still young and deadly and free. 

She called him beautiful, when Stiles asked, called him a monster in the next breath and he wonders, sometimes, what came first, the same way others wonder about chickens and eggs.

Was he beautiful before he was a monster? Or did the beauty she saw in him come later and the teeth first?

Did she know, is the point. Did she know, even when he invited her to his table, onto the dancefloor, into his apartment, that she would one day bury a knife in his chest and struggle as he landed, dying and bleeding, on top of her on their checkered kitchen floor in Moscow. 

+

There are five names in the files Peter gave him: Deucalion, Kali, Ennis, Aiden, Ethan. Red eyes, red hands, and, once he’s checked the system, at least three separate bounties on their heads. Flagged neatly with a little dog’s head symbol. Supernatural. Dangerous. 

The system doesn’t mark failed attempts, because it would be bad business, but the oldest bounty is more than five years old and too old for others not to have tried before. 

Tried and failed. 

And Peter calls it a gift. 

But then, Peter’s always been a little left of center and twisted to boot. He probably actually believes that he is giving Stiles a genuine gift.

The funny thing is, so does Stiles. If nothing else, killing five alphas in a cohesive pack is going to be a challenge. 

+

He’s not quite right. Not in his head, not in his heart. 

He speaks English and still dreams in Russian, even after all these years. He has thrown out all his mother’s possessions except the straight razor, which he remembers her by when he murders people for money. 

He looks at his hands and expects them to be red, feels nothing akin to shame and lies without his heartbeat fluttering even once. 

He doesn’t remember his birthday, or the name he was born with, but the memory of his father’s blood on the black and white kitchen floor hasn’t faded even a little in over a decade. 

Definitely not right.

+

The problem with killing a group as big as the alpha pack is logistics. 

If he starts with the lower ranking members, the rest is going to be forewarned and almost impossible to take on. If he starts with the head of the snake, the chances are that the rest will scatter and Stiles leaves no survivors. It’s not just a matter of professional pride, but basic fucking common sense. Don’t leave anyone to point fingers or try for revenge. 

See also: Kate Argent and the Hales. 

So his only option, pretty much, is to take them all at once and that throws up a whole new problem: How the hell do you kill five alpha werewolves simultaneously, or at least close enough to make no nevermind?

+

And if she knew what her husband would turn into, what he was, beneath his skin, how did she stay with him for fifteen years?

How did she love him, marry him, have a child with him, all the while knowing that one day, he would turn his fangs and claws on her and she’d have to kill the man she loved?

How can you love something you know you have to kill?

+

One night, staking out the alphas’ current hideout, Peter stops passive-aggressively texting Derek dirty jokes long enough to drawl, “I’ve been meaning to ask. How does a small town teenager like you end up a professional hit man?”

Stiles makes another note in his little black notebook (yes, he has one of those for each job, burns them afterwards) and looks up, meeting the wolf’s glowing eyes in the dark interior of the car. “You mean you haven’t looked me up yet? Sloppy, Peter, sloppy.”

Peter grins like it’s permission. In a way, it is. He pulls up google on his phone and starts typing furiously. 

+

Stiles’ first kiss what when he was eight (nine? ten?) and Heather’s lips tasted like strawberry chapstick. 

Afterwards, Heather told him it was okay.

His first kill was when he was six (truly six, first time six) and the man was someone his father brought around for a drink sometimes. His eyes were grey. His insides were darker than Stiles thought they would be. 

Afterwards his mother told him to untie her, quickly, quickly, there’ll be more, my love. 

+

“Did you know that you don’t have a record anywhere in the state of California until you turned six?” Peter asks, dropping into the seat across from Stiles, stealing a sip of his hipster-central coffee.

“Really,” Stiles answers, flatly, and it’s not a question.

“Mhm. Yes. Same goes for all other forty-nine states, I’m afraid. Tell me, Stiles, where were you born?”

“In a hospital,” Stiles deadpans and goes back to his book. Peter watches him a moment longer, then stands up. 

He returns five minutes later with his own drink and two muffins, plated separately, sits back down and slots his feet seamlessly between Stiles’ at the table. 

They stay there until dusk. 

+

It’s going to have to be all five at once. That leaves not a lot of options. Fire. Explosives. A sniper rifle. 

He tells Peter so, late at night. 

“Fire again?” the man drawls. “This is starting to become a habit.”

“Twice is not a habit.”

Peter flutters his lashes. “You mean I’m the only one you’ve set on fire so far?” he clutches a hand to his chest. “I feel honored.”

Against his will (lie) Stiles laughs. “I didn’t actually. You caught the bottle. Allison’s arrow did you in. And Jackson threw the second one.”

“And yet, I believe it was your recipe, wasn’t it?”

Squirming until he’s sideways in the passenger seat, legs drawn up, Stiles studies the wolf’s profile. “Are we really joking about that time you got burned alive _again_?”

Peter taps his fingers against the steering wheel. It takes Stiles a long minute to figure out that the man it tapping out Stiles’ heartbeat. “I was under the impression that this kind of humor was more your speed than lolcats.”

“Hey, lolcats are awesome!”

Peter chuckles.

+

Boom.

Kali first, gutshot. Ensuring Ennis sticks around.

Howls fill the air.

Peter inhales deeply, as if he can smell the blood from three blocks away. Perhaps he can.

Boom.

Aiden next, gutshot. Ensuring Ethan sticks around, curling around his brother like a shield, eyes squeezed shut.

Boom.

Deucalion next, headshot, before he can get too far away. He changes even as the wolfsbane eats him up. Stiles wastes a second bullet on the Demon Wolf.

Peter chuckles, darkly.

Boom.

Ethan, headshot. The twins were the least of the lesser evils, more victims than perpetrators. Poor babies. They die just the same and Stiles knows he should feel sorry, but he’s never claimed to be a good person. 

Boom.

Ennis, headshot.

Peter’s chuckle turns sharp and ugly. 

Boom.

Aiden again. Headshot. He just lies there, next to his brother, waiting for it. Mercy, if Stiles needed the excuse. 

Peter leaps over the edge of the roof and disappears. 

Kali tries to crawl away, so Stiles takes out both her knees and then calmly collects the shells, dissembles his gun and shoulders it. 

By the time the sirens come within human earshot, he’s three blocks away, throwing his lacrosse bag into the back of the jeep, calmly heading for a backroad that will take him out of town and then back in on the other end. 

He hates making a mess in his home town, but this one was inevitable. The police (daddy, daddy, daddy) will never know and the pack will blame Peter, suspect him of hiring a professional, even, but they will never prove it and never tell anyone. 

Especially not if Peter sticks to the plan and frees the hostages kept in the bank. That should garner him enough goodwill to get away with, well. Murder. 

+

When Peter comes for him later that night, his eyes are red and there is still blood caked under his nails. 

He laughs when he realizes the usual mountain-ash line is absent from the window and practically curls up on top of Stiles, like a big, well-fed cat, burying his face in the younger man’s neck. 

Stiles could pretend to be scandalized, could squawk and squeak and try to get away, but they’ve been headed for this since Stiles felt Peter behind him as he slit Gerard’s throat and did nothing. 

He runs a hand through the wolf’s hair and asks, “Did you get away clean?”

“Mhm. Thank you, Stiles, for my gift.” He draws back far enough to flash redredred again.

“I thought they were my gift?”

Another hum. “You were magnificent. So calm, so sure. Did you know, your heart didn’t even speed up while you murdered five people in cold blood. Not once. Not even a little.”

“Four,” Stiles corrects. It’s stupid, saying these things out loud, but Peter _makes_ him stupid. Just a little. 

A laugh. “Where we your born, Stiles?”

Russia. Moscow. A hospital run by a man who owed the mob a lot of money in gambling debts. To a woman who carried a straight razor in her pocket and a man with prison tattoos scattered across his scar-marked skin. 

Far away, in winter. In the snow. In a world where monsters had no skin to shed, no human masks to pull on over glowing eyes. 

He tightens his grip on Peter’s hair, hauls him down and kisses him, because he’ll never say any of those things out loud and Peter, well, Peter doesn’t really care, does he?

+

He thinks he gets it, now. 

Loving monsters. 

Peter is not tame and he never will be. One day, his ambition, his hunger, his madness, will drive him to do something Stiles, cold and calculated and a little twisted up inside, cannot forgive. 

And on that day, Stiles will flick open the straight razor his mother gave him and he will use what Lena taught him and Peter will die. 

But that day is not today.

Today, Peter gets to be a beautiful monster and Stiles gets to love him.

And maybe, maybe, it’s not Peter at all, who is the monster, but Stiles. 

Either way, it ends the same.

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
